Rome is to America: My Obsession

A friend of mine recently said, only half jokingly, that I ought to finish Democracy in America before the lessons no longer apply. Tocqueville's assertions seem to be of three types: those that are true or mostly so; those that were once true but are no longer; and, rarest of all, educated guesses that turned out to be patently wrong. Most unfortunate, the second type seems to be ever increasing.

Yet even though his observations become less true with each step towards autocracy, his work is a classic, and the reader will be delighted to find moments when the strange French man put things just so. To use but one example:

[P]atriotism and religion are the only two motives in the world which can permanently direct the whole of a body politic to one end.

Americans are no longer near as religious as we once were, and though many still attend church, the hypocrisy of the millions of Christians the nation over is both rampant and rank. A quick survey of statistics surrounding divorce and promiscuity will not exonerate the followers of Christ whose commitment, it would seem, all too often tends to be of a purely verbal variety.

Patriotism seems to fare little better. The Fox News crowd is content to march, rank and file with their commander in chief, but as soon as the letter next to his name changes from R to D, the supposed patriotism will immediately fade. There is nothing wrong with partisanship, and, to quote Chesterton, "'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" Yet patriotism demands a love for country so long as it adheres to a specific set of principles. The two major parties disagree formally on little, and even less in terms of action, and a fervor for one coupled with a disdain for the other is more madness than patriotism.

Being the eternal pessimist, I see little hope that either religion or patriotism are renewed in time to save the republic. In fact, the more despotic a country becomes, the more difficult it is for the true patriots to continue to stand by her. We still have a long way to go on the road to totalitarianism, but without some signs of improvement, or at least a committment by one of the parties for a return to the principles upon which this nation was founded, it's going to be terribly difficult for the patriot to feel patriotic.

A return to religion is more probable, and, in the long run, the only thing that will bring salvation, not only in the world to come, but here as well. It is possible that the people of this fair land could re-discover the religion of their ancestors, and conjure up passion for something to which their present feelings are tepid at best, but it is not wise to place hope above reason. The Christian religion will survive; more specifically, the Catholic Church will continue to exist as a bastion of light and truth, but it is less than clear what role American believers will play in the upcoming scenes in salvation history.

The more I study the Church, the more I find kernals of wisdom she has deposited throughout the ages. I close with this gem from Augustine, whose words, composed some sixteen hundred years ago, are just as applicable to the Americans as they were to the citizens of Rome, to which Augustine gives mock voice.

"So long as it lasts," [the Romans] said, "so long as it enjoys material prosperity and the glory of victorious war, or better, the security of peace, why should we worry? What concerns us is that we should get richer all the time, to have enough for extravagant spending every day, enough to keep our inferiors in their place…It is a good thing to have the din of dancing everywhere, and theatres full of fevered shouts of degenerate pleasure and of every kind of cruel and degraded indulgence. Anyone who disapproves of this kind of happiness should rank as a public enemy..."

And so it goes; and so it goes.